All out of time and into space. Come out of the time-word “the” forever. Come out of the body-word “thee” forever. There is nothing to fear. There is no thing in space. There is no word to fear. There is no word in space.

Istigkeit—wasn’t that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? “Is-ness.” The Being of Platonic philosophy—except that Plato seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were—a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence.

Wheels of Ugarit poetry drum in my mind, and I slush in them, feeling massaged by cuneiform constancies, dreaming myself assigned to the task of sorting my son’s remains from the belly of the bird, or my own remains, and the gods’ remains up in the belly of some higher Zoroastrian bird, my eyes, full of the same nuts as Ugarit, dilated with wine, dunked off Byblos, enchanted by elements.